Unlock the Magic in Your Story Now
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Articles filed in: Marketing
5 Ways To Be A More Resourceful Marketer
The problem with most marketing is that it not only feels inauthentic to the customer, it also relies on tired old tactics that do the opposite of what the marketer intended. It interrupts instead of inspiring, disconnects instead of delighting. We can do better.
How To Be A More Resourceful Marketer
1. Pretend you have a marketing budget of zero dollars.
What would you do today to reach five new customers who would be thrilled to hear from you?
2. Stop looking over your shoulder at what your competitors or colleagues are doing.
Think about why you want to grow your business. What is your intention? What are you on a mission to do? Write it down.
3. Empathise with your customer.
Don’t think of your customers as a homogenous group. Think about one person who needs your product or service. Write down six things about him that are completely unrelated to your product or service. What did you learn? How does this change your marketing strategy?
4. Create your own definition of ‘good marketing’.
What does great marketing look, sound and feel like? Can you think of some examples that made you want to connect more deeply with a business or brand? What did they do differently?
5. Think small—avoid speaking to the market of everyone.
What’s the least number of customers you need to attract to build a sustainable business?
Who are they? Where are they? Why will they be delighted to hear from you?
We don’t have to be bound by industry standards and cookie cutter marketing formulas.
We get to choose how we tell our story.
Image by Thomas Hawk.
The First Step To Mastering The Art Of Brand Storytelling
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
There are more than a dozen places to buy coffee in the commuter belt adjacent to Southern Cross Station. You can choose from artisan roasters, international cafe franchises or convenience stores and pay as little as $1 or as much as $5 for a takeaway coffee—all within 30 metres of the station. So how do people choose?
It’s clear that each cafe tells a very different brand story using price, design, location and more to communicate to the particular customer they want to attract and serve. The perception of value drives some customers. Others are drawn by convenience, the ambience of the venue or simply the ritual that feels best. Each customer has a different worldview about the value of a $5 coffee. And yet if you stood on the pavement outside the station you’d find it hard to tell those customers apart.
So where does a business owner begin? The first step to attracting (and keeping) the customers you want is to understand what it is they want. What do they believe in, care about or fear? Where do you come in? Your business can’t fulfil the unspoken desires and unmet needs of a customer you haven’t fully understood.
The biggest challenge to telling better brand stories isn’t that we don’t have a story to tell. It’s that we’re not telling a story that matches the worldview of our prospective customers. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is if you don’t understand the worldview of the person who will buy it. The first step to mastering the art of brand storytelling and being a better marketer is to stand in your customer’s shoes.
I created the Story Strategy Course to enable you to do exactly that. If you want to find more ways to resonate with customers and differentiate from your competitors. If you’d like to understand where to devote your marketing resources and why. If you’d like to simply get better at telling the story of the value you create this course will show you how.
Registrations are open now. We start at the end of the month. If you’re ready to take the first step to telling a better story, I hope you’ll join us.
Image by Linh Nguyen.
The Best Opportunity
One of the best things about our family’s move to Melbourne two years ago has been the rediscovery of local shopping strips. In beautiful Perth, where we lived for ten years, our grocery shopping involved a car trip to one of the dominant, big chain supermarkets. In Melbourne, we live a two-minute stroll from a tiny local bakery and an organic grocery shop. Needless to say, I’m in the organic shop every day (sometimes twice) for something—fresh bananas for morning smoothies or a forgotten herb for dinner. The range and quality of the food are excellent, and the staff are pleasant—but their smiles never quite reach their eyes. Like many of the other regular customers who pop in daily or weekly I’m not greeted by name, in fact, it almost feels like I’m a brand new customer every time I shop there. What a missed opportunity!
In life and business, we’re often guilty of pursuing the next opportunity—those elusive two birds in the bush. We ignore the moment that is staring us in the face right now to embrace an advantage or make a difference.
The organic shop doesn’t need to work for my loyalty because it’s convenient, but they should be working harder for my love. As business owners, we innovate and market to sustain tomorrow’s growth—while sometimes ignoring the opportunity to create an impact today.
The best opportunity might be the one we have our back to at this very moment.
Image by G. Morel.
When Does Your Marketing Start?
The conventional definition of marketing describes it as the activities we do to promote sales of products or services. If we accept this definition, then the bulk of our marketing is done once we’re ready to sell our product.
Tactics like list building, data collection, content creation, social media outreach, networking events and leaflet drops might make us better promoters, but they don’t make us better marketers. Unlike the gelato seller who relies on sweltering summer days and the tinkling music from his van to make hay while the sun shines—the best marketers understand that marketing is not just about building awareness. It’s about establishing trust on the road to creating meaning and forging connections, loyalty and love. The kind that makes people queue for a $5 cone even on the coldest winter day.
Your marketing starts with your intention to create products and services that make a difference to the people you serve.
Image by Sebastian Rieger.
What You Want To Say Vs. What People Need To Hear
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Every one of us has a story to tell—something we want someone to hear. So we begin crafting our messages by prioritising our need to be heard. The irony is the best way to make an idea resonate is not to start with all the things you need to get off your chest, but instead to think about who’s listening and what they need to hear.
Before you send the email, write your sales copy or draft that proposal stop for a moment to consider what the person who will read it is doing, thinking and feeling right now.
What would you say to him if you were looking him in the eye in that moment? Start there.
When we get this right, it’s the difference between a music player with a 5 GB hard drive and 1000 songs in your pocket. And more importantly, it creates a world full of intentional and thoughtful ideas, stories and connections we can be proud of.
Image by Sebastian Rieger.
How Are Your Customers Convinced?
Real estate agents get more new listings from the refferrals made by satisfied sellers, than they do from letterbox dropping flyers.
Hotel rooms are increasingly booked on the strength of previous guest reviews on Trip Advisor, not because of the room sizes and facilities published on their website.
New gym members are often persuaded to join by friends who are already members, while they mostly ignore the newspaper and TV ad campaigns in January.
We allocate marketing resources to promote our businesses in the places where we think our customers are paying attention, often without fully understanding the real impact of the investment we’re making or the potential of the opportunities we’re ignoring. It’s possible to overestimate the effect of lead generation tools and tactics while underestimating the power of a handshake.
How are your customers convinced?
Are you creating opportunities to meet and market to those prospective customers where they are?
Image by Garry Knight.
Why Do Your Customers Buy?
How thirsty is the college student who pays almost $5 for a Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks?
Did the fitness instructor really need to upgrade his iPhone 6 to a 7?
Can the mother who religiously gives her kids vitamins each morning prove that they work?
When the CEO hires a contract lawyer is she paying for the piece of paper or the peace of mind his expertise will give her?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines value as; “The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something” and its “material or monetary worth”. It turns out that the immaterial—the perception of value that’s created by wants not needs, feelings, not facts, and beliefs, not proof is what drives people to act. We recognise this behaviour in ourselves and witness it in the choices we make every day.
And yet when it comes to marketing our products and services—because it’s harder to do the work of understanding our customer’s motivations than it is to talk about what we want to sell, we lead with features, facts and proof. If value is a story customers tell themselves, then our innovation and marketing must acknowledge and respond to that internal narrative.
Image by Jack Fussell.
The Good Marketer’s Dilemma
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
People (including you and me) often convince themselves that they make logical decisions about what to buy based on things like quality and price. If this were true, then there would be no need for businesses to invest in packaging, design or user experience.
Packaging, design and copy tell a story that reinforces a worldview—enabling the customer to rationalise purchasing decisions. There’s a reason the body moisturiser comes in a gold tinted bottle. It reminds the buyer of the soft ‘sun-kissed summer skin’ she longs to achieve. The marketing copy on the front reinforces the message with descriptions of precious oils, intense nourishment and radiant glow.
The ‘RESULTS’ achieved by other consumers (41 of them who used the product for a week, if you’re paying attention to the fine print and asterisks), are detailed on the back.
+INTENSE NOURISHMENT: reduced dryness 53%*.
+RADIANT GLOW: 78% of women noticed a difference.**
+NOICEABLE SMOOTHNESS: 93% of women agree.**
The stories marketers tell are assurances upon which customers base their expectations. So while we might make the sale today, if the story doesn’t live up to the expectations we’ve created, then we risk sacrificing customer loyalty and sustainable business growth for that quick win.
We (you and me) make up the companies, businesses and organisations that help people (who deserve to live in an asterisk-free world) to create habits, decide and choose. Our marketing not only communicates our value it also demonstrates our values. We’re responsible for both what’s inside the bottle and the effect of the stories we tell on the outside. That very fact means we’re more powerful than we know. Good marketers live with this dilemma every day. It’s worth remembering that it’s easier than we think to reach a sales target or to get an idea to spread and much harder to be proud that we did.
Image by Thomas Hawk.
How To Communicate Value Beyond Describing Features And Benefits
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
In an attempt to gain the trust of prospective customers we often resort to simply telling them about our product’s features and benefits. While describing value might seem like the easiest way to communicate it, the simplest strategy isn’t always the most compelling one.
When value is demonstrated rather than described it immediately becomes more relatable. Your customers need to know more than how the thing works—they want to understand how that functionality creates a change for them. Showing is more powerful than telling because it reflects the customer’s desire, problem or dilemma (alongside your potential solution) back to him. This is why success stories build trust in a way marketing copy never can.
10 Alternative Ways To Communicate Value
1. Show the number and calibre of customers you’ve worked with and impacted.
2. Use case studies to demonstrate the results you’ve helped customers to achieve.
3. Create product review, press and feedback pages on your website.
4. Publish customer testimonials and positive feedback from social media.
5. Share images and video of the product in use.
6. Encourage customers to share their photos, videos, and product reviews online.
7. Create pilot programs, free webinars or white papers to showcase your skills and expertise.
8. Show how customers use and enjoy your products or services.
9. Create content that answers customer’s questions.
10. Celebrate your audience.
Harley Davidson’s most powerful marketing isn’t the detail about engine size, speed or low-end torque that’s written in the brochure—it’s the stories riders tell about the feeling they get when they ride one. And often your most effective marketing may not even be done by you.
Image by Andy.
The Power Of Story To Find Value
filed in Marketing, News, Storytelling
As business leaders, entrepreneurs and marketers we’re used to leveraging the power of story to describe value. We mostly use stories as a tool for telling. Because we believe the way to succeed is to be more vocal and visible, we create campaigns, sales letters, videos and press releases. We craft headlines, posts and tweets in an attempt to create awareness.
All the while we’re missing opportunities to use stories to make us more aware, to notice and to listen out for what the world is waiting for or wants from us. Yes, it’s possible to use a story to portray us as the hero, but it’s also a powerful tool for finding out how to be one. By harnessing story in a counter-intuitive way to listen rather than trying to be heard, we discover what’s missing. We suddenly see how we can create value and find opportunities to succeed by serving in ways others have overlooked. This is how a groundbreaking hospitality company was born, not by building more hotel rooms, but by creating a greater sense of belonging, and why a book about tidying up has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for 109 weeks.
The amount of noise in the world, the data and cues we’re meant to pay attention to can feel like navigating a strange city in a blizzard. But when we allow ourselves to stop for a second to get our bearings we often find the right path. Just as in the stillness that follows a storm, the snow settles on branches and surfaces, reflecting light, bringing everything into sharp relief and revealing details we just hadn’t seen before.
Image by Linh Nguyen.